Rail boss vowing to solve trains chaos
NORTHERN’S MD APOLOGISES AGAIN FOR PROBLEMS DUE TO ‘LOTS OF DIFFERENT FACTORS’
THE M.E.N. has spoken to Northern rail’s boss following months of disruption and delays for passengers.
After weeks of asking for an interview, David Brown, managing director of Northern, which is run by Arriva Rail North, sat down for a chat to explain what has gone wrong on the beleaguered service. Here is the interview... Q: What would you like to say to passengers who have been so badly let down by your service, not just with the new timetable, but before then? A: The service we have offered recently has not been adequate and we accept that and we’ve apologised, and we apologise again for that. All our effort at Northern is going in to getting that sorted. Nobody, including me, our staff at stations, our planners, want to be providing this level of service and that’s why we are putting all our efforts into the recovery plan and getting it sorted. We are absolutely fixated on getting it sorted. Q: Do you care about your customers or is Arriva Rail North just a profitmaking outfit? A: All my staff want to provide the best service they can. That’s me all the way down, so that’s why we’ve been working really, really hard trying to deliver the best service we can to customers. Q: Many people are saying that the service is so bad you should be stripped of your franchise. What would you say to that? A: To be honest, our focus is on stabilising the network, giving the service that we want and then leading into the modernisation and transformation of the franchise. This franchise contains far more growth and investment than the last two or three franchisees. It’s an opportunity so that’s what we are focussing on. Q: The timetable change obviously sent services spiralling but Northern passengers had been complaining about cancellations, delays and a lack of carriages long before then. Why was this allowed to go on for so long? A: The timetable that was introduced on May 20, we had to rewrite that over a short period - a three to four month period. Normally that takes nine to 10 months. Because the infrastructure we expected to be available, we were told in January wouldn’t be available, we had to rewrite the timetable which has then led to the level of service we’ve provided since May, which is clearly not acceptable. That’s partly because the timetable was written in short notice and that’s thrown up a lot of additional driver training requirements and we’ve been trying to do that as well as run the train service which clearly doesn’t work so that’s why we’ve been trying to run the interim timetable. Q: Once it emerged that there was going to be a problem with the new timetable, why did it take so long - so much pain for passengers, so much pressure from the media and
politicians - for that emergency timetable to be put in place? A: I absolutely agree it felt a long time but actually in the railway terms it’s actually quite a short period of time, so we’ve managed to put it in after two weeks for a period of eight weeks. Places elsewhere in the country aren’t able to do that for a further period. So I know it felt like a really long time but that was actually all our effort to look at what we could put in place really quickly and we think we did that in a reasonable amount of time. Q - So, realistically when will passengers see that full promised timetable in place working properly without delays and cancellations? A: The plan is after this eight weeks we will be able to reintroduce the services that were taken out and then focus on making sure we are delivering that to the proper level. Q: So whose responsibility is it for what happened? A: We accept responsibility for delivering a train service and that’s clearly not being provided to the right standard at the moment but there are lots of different factors that have led to the timetable being delivered in the way it was. Q: What guarantees can you now give passengers about the future? A - We can guarantee we are now working hard to fix the issues that we’ve got. We’ve put the interim timetable in, we’re seeing some improvement in the performance, we’re working really hard with Network Rail to make sure the underlying issues are sorted out, so we can enter the summer on a more stable basis. We are trying to give people more certainty about the services they can get.